Last year, a group of Wyoming women passionate about art came together and formed the Wyoming Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. By creating this committee, the group is able to nominate one upcoming Wyoming artist to the 2024 Women to Watch exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. Sarah Ortegon High Walking will be that artist. Wyoming Public Radio’s Kamila Kudelska spoke with Ortegon High Walking on what this nomination means to her and what her art hopes to express. First, they dove into her childhood.
Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Sarah Ortegon High Walking: I was born into a family of 12. My mom had six boys and six girls. I was born in Denver, Colorado. And my parents would, from the age of three, they would take me to the [Wind River Reservation]. And we spent our summers out there. And maybe from age of when I was 11, or 12, they actually would leave me with my aunt and uncle George and Shirley Enos. They would leave me to basically just play outside on the rez, with my aunt and uncle, and we stayed with them for a few months during the summer.
Kamila Kudelska: Can you tell me a little bit of how you started working in art and how that kind of came out for you?
SOHW: I don't actually know why I started doing art. It was just a part of something that I believe was always a need to express myself. And not always having the resource of needing to actually speak my emotions. I always say that art is a quiet expression. But sometimes it can be the loudest because they say that our paintings are sometimes worth 1,000 words. I was more of a quiet person growing up. And because my dad was a preacher, I was required to be seen and not heard. And so that led to me expressing myself through art.
KK: What does it mean to you to be chosen as the Wyoming woman representative at the National Museum of Women in the Arts exhibit?
SOHW: It's a huge honor to be chosen. It's also very nerve wracking, because I feel like there was a reason that I was chosen, and I want to live up to the artist that I can be. I just had a baby. And so my art production has slowed down. But that doesn't make me any less of an artist. So I think it's going to have a profound impact on my future, not only on my present, because I think that this is going to solidify me in the art world. It's really hard I feel sometimes for women to be taken seriously as artists, because we have to be so multifaceted. We have to work and it is the same for men, but in the capacity that we're needed as mothers and as sisters, there's just a lot that's required of us. And so even throughout history, there's not a whole lot of women artists that are recognized. But the women that were recognized were very powerful artists. And so it just means a lot to me. And I honestly think that it's going to change the trajectory of my life.
KK: My understanding is that you already have an idea of the piece of work that you're going to be presenting at the exhibit. Could you describe it?
SOHW: In 2013, I went and competed in Miss Native American USA. And I did not believe that I was going to win the title. But I did win the title. I was practicing in the first jingle dress that I was ever given. And I was already 23 by that time. And typically, we begin to dance when we're two or three years old already out in the powwow circle. For me to be 23 and taking my first steps in a jingle dress, and I used that jingle dress to compete, it was just…that was also a very life changing time in my life. And so I depicted the jingle dress, and I got my inspiration through Frida Kahlo, and how she depicts herself in two separate viewpoints. But I removed my physical self and I just painted the dresses, and it looked like they're moving, they're just floating in movement. And the background was white. I added beadwork onto the belt areas of the two dresses that I put side by side on the painting. The dress was red, and I called it my first steps. And so I wanted to replicate that on four different panels kind of in a circular motion. The panels will be square, but it'll be hung in a circular motion. I'll be painting different dresses, and they will be representative of the different seasons of our life, of the different seasons of the world…winter, summer, fall, and spring. I am planning to take footage of Wyoming in its different seasons and put those videos on top of the paintings that I paint. So it's going to show the transition of the different seasons on the paintings.
KK: I love that. Can you kind of talk about what a jingle dress is?
SOHW: So the jingle dress comes from the Anishinaabe people, which are also known as the Ojibwe people. It was a dream that came to an elder whose daughter was sick. And there are different versions of the story but this is the version I was told. So I'll share that. And so through his vision, he saw the dress. And originally it was tobacco can lids that were used for the jingles. We use tobacco in order to pray so it's a prayer dance, basically. So the dress can have up to 365 jingles on it representing each day of the year. Not every jingle dress is that way. There are contemporary jingle dress dancers now. And it's a lot more fancy than what it used to be. So that's basically what a jingle dress is. It's a dress that you dance in and it has jingles that sound like rain when you dance. If you were to dance without a drum, it sounds like rain on a tin roof.
KK: The exhibit in D.C. has a theme, which is “New, Future, and Alternative Worlds.” So I wonder if you can describe how that theme fits with the piece of work that you just described?
SOHW: What I am relating to new and alternative worlds is the fact that we as human beings need to go back to helping one another. And, as in, like, whenever we're talking about prayer for things or supporting one another, I think that's something that has become lost in the digital era. Right now, I feel like when you lose contact in the physical realm of being in another's presence, it kind of separates people from one another. I feel like if you're to go back in time, and to see how Shoshone and Arapaho people have… previously they were on the same reservation, but traditionally, you know, enemies. But that's not what I want to focus on. What I want to focus on, is even as a separate people, there was always a home for our people. There wasn't this concept of money, everything was more of a natural life. And so I feel like that's what I'm wanting to bring back to the future of who we are. Not even just Native people, but people in general. Nature could be very violent at times. But it's also there to help support each other, like the water supports the trees, supports the birds, supports the feeding of our predators. And so it's a continuous cycle of regeneration. And that's one thing that I want to bring back through my artwork is going back to the humanity of who we are, going back to our family relations and to praying for one another.
